This morning I linked my way over to a piece by Clay Shirky entitled Andrew Keen: Rescuing ‘Luddite’ from the Luddites, which I found thought provoking from both a societal perspective and a PlansForUs perspective.

First, an admission. I never knew who the Luddites were, despite the fact that I liberally used the word in many of my college papers and most likely when trying to impress my elders (seems my contemporaries are never to impressed with my vocabulary). So, finding the history of the Luddite movement was really informative.

Now to the meat. Andrew Keen has written a book The Cult of the Amateur which has really stirred up the new media folks. His claim, most simply, is that today’s Internet is killing culture. Clay Shirky has a nuanced response which you can read, but like Nicholas Carr, I thought this quote was the most interesting:

The internet’s output is data, but its product is freedom, lots and lots of freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, the freedom of an unprecedented number of people to say absolutely anything they like at any time, with the reasonable expectation that those utterances will be globally available, broadly discoverable at no cost, and preserved for far longer than most utterances are, and possibly forever.

I think this is a pretty great direction for society. Yes, it is confusing. Yes, it is cacophonous and sometimes difficult to filter the signal from the noise. But the beauty of the situation is that people are finding personal, unique signals amidst the noise. The consequence of so much unique/personal signal being identified and revealed is that our knowledge base is growing at an exponential rate. So keep the editors out of this, our world is growing more complex by the day and simplifying and professionally editing just hides the full reality of things.

So what does that statement mean for PlansForUs. It means, that the platform of idea exchange that we are building for teachers is full of great ideas for each of your unique teaching situations. There are no universals, just unique ways to connect your students to the knowledge that you share with them everyday.
Keep on signing up teachers, this is going to be awesome.

by Tyler, CEO